Some supporters of Donald Trump echo the anti-Obama ‘birther’ movement, which launched the Republican to political fame, and affirm that Kamala Harris cannot run for the White House.
Donald Trump has a long history of baselessly claiming that his political opponents are unfit to run for office, and some of his supporters are doing something similar with Kamala Harris.
A group known as the National Federation of Republican Assemblies has launched a campaign to delegitimize Harris’ candidacyon the basis that his parents were not US citizens at the time of his birth.
The Federation has adopted this theory as its official position, citing the Dred Scott case of 1857, in which the Supreme Court ruled that Enslaved people were not US citizens and therefore not entitled to constitutional protections.
“Several states, candidates, and major political parties have ignored this critical presidential qualification, including candidates Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Kamala Harris, whose parents were not U.S. citizens at the time of their birth,” the group argues, pointing to two former Republican candidates alongside the current Democratic candidate.
There is no realistic chance that Harris will fall for this legal argument, which is based on a very unorthodox reading of the “natural born citizen” clause of the first amendment of the US Constitution.:
Harris meets this standard in every way. Nevertheless, Trump and others have began to raise spurious questions about his identity -the former president has falsely claimed that she had turned black after years of supposedly pretending to be Indian-, while he and other Republicans insist on mispronouncing her first name, Kamala, emphasizing that she is not of European-American origin .
It is a callback to the so-called ‘birther’ panic of the 2010s, a phenomenon that Trump used to boost himself on the political scene during the presidency of Barack Obama.
A question of birth
In the 2010s, long before running for office, Donald Trump became the loudest US exponent of the unfounded theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenyawhich meant that he could not run for president under the natural citizen clause.
The claim that Obama was born in Kenya, and not the US, took root among right-wing media and grassroots activists long before Trump and others took it up. The so-called ‘birthers’ claimed that the president had hidden the truth and that he had to provide reliable evidence of his place of birth to be accepted as legitimate president.
This was often combined with false claim that Obama was Muslim secretly, a notion that was based on a photo of him visiting Kenya in 2006 and his middle name, Hussein.
Actually, Obama was able to present his birth certificateand his citizenship was never questioned by anyone in the political mainstream. Trump, however, beat the drum for several years. In 2011, Obama took advantage of his appearance at the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association to ridicule Trump for his obsession with the ‘birther’ theory.while Trump himself was sitting in the audience.
In light of Trump’s explicit and continued personal hatred of Obama, this incident is often viewed as the moment that encouraged Trump to finally run for president after years considering it.
Obama’s rival in the 2008 election, John McCain, was also briefly the subject of questions about his eligibility for having been born not in the US itself, but in the Panama Canal zone, then under US control.
In his case, the discussion did not revolve around a discredited theory with xenophobic and anti-Muslim overtones, but rather a debate about whether The natural citizen clause applied to those born in the area at the time of McCain’s birth, because it was then under US jurisdiction.
But unlike Obama, who had to endure conspiracy theories about his biography throughout his presidency, it soon became clear that there was no desire to expel McCain from the ballot on a technicality, nor to cast doubt on his identity.
